As our apostolate began to take shape several years ago, the name “Mary’s Sons” came to Director Robyn Magyar one day as she prayed before the Blessed Sacrament in Holy Eucharistic Adoration. She wrote it down in her journal, not realizing that this would become the name of the apostolate a year later.
The name “Mary’s Sons” signifies the profound spiritual relationship between the Blessed Mother and all priests, who have been called to follow in the footsteps of her son, Jesus Christ. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI offers a beautiful explanation of this relationship and the deep love that Mary has for priests in his reflection entitled “Mary as the Mother of Priests:”
“….Before dying, Jesus sees his Mother beneath the Cross and he sees the beloved son. This beloved son is certainly a person, a very important individual, but he is more; he is an example, a prefiguration of all beloved disciples, of all the people called by the Lord to be the “beloved disciple” and thus also particularly of priests.
Jesus says to Mary: “Woman, behold, your son!” (Jn 19:26). It is a sort of testament: he entrusts his Mother to the care of the son, of the disciple. But he also says to the disciple: “Behold, your mother!” (Jn 19:27).
The Gospel tells us that from that hour St. John, the beloved son, took his mother Mary: “to his own home.”
This is what it says in the [English] translation; but the Greek text is far deeper, far richer. We could translate it: he took Mary into his inner life, his inner being, “eis tàìdia”, into the depths of his being.
To take Mary with one means to introduce her into the dynamism of one’s own entire existence — it is not something external — and into all that constitutes the horizon of one’s own apostolate.
It seems to me that one can, therefore, understand how the special relationship of motherhood that exists between Mary and priests may constitute the primary source, the fundamental reason for her special love for each one of them.
In fact, Mary loves them with predilection for two reasons: because they are more like Jesus, the supreme love of her heart, and because, like her, they are committed to the mission of proclaiming, bearing witness to, and giving Christ to the world.
Because of his identification with and sacramental conformation to Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, every priest can and must feel that he really is a specially beloved son of this loftiest and humblest of Mothers.
The Second Vatican Council invites priests to look to Mary as to the perfect model for their existence, invoking her as “Mother of the supreme and eternal Priest, as Queen of Apostles, and as Protectress of their ministry”. The Council continues, “priests should always venerate and love her, with a filial devotion and worship” (cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis,n. 18).
Taken from:
L’Osservatore Romano
Weekly Edition in English
26 August 2009, page 7